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Archive for July, 2015

If you had told me in 1975 that 40 years later Silicon Valley would be hosting an informational meeting to advertise an upcoming tech conference in Vietnam, I would have said you were crazy.

Like millions of others in April 1975, I watched apocryphal images on the nightly news of thousands of refuges being airlifted off rooftops in Saigon and military helicopters being pushed off the decks of aircraft carriers to make room for the human detritus of the final throes of decades of war, the last 10 of which included overwhelming American involvement and a death toll far in excess of a million lives.

Even today, that war, its architects and aftermath, are proving themselves to be contentious, divisive topics in American homes and in our national arenas of political mud-slinging.

Yet this blog is not about all of that; it’s about the aforementioned tech conference. But to start without a brief mention of 1975 is to write about a small brochure lying on the tabletop while a massive elephant stands muddy and mute in the middle of the room. At least for people of my generation.

In Vietnam today, however, folks of my generation are no longer the norm. The population now stands at 93 million-plus, the median age is 30, the country is young and optimistic, and looking to its future as an admired destination for tourists and international business interests alike.

Everybody at IBM, GlobalFoundaries, and Samsung (the triumvirate formerly known as Common Platform). Luminaries at Stanford, SUNY, and the Albany NanoTech Complex. Even the Good Governor of the Great Empire State himself.

Once again it’s an acquisition, and once again the lucky winner’s Synopsys. This time the prize is Elliptic Technologies, “a provider of cryptography cores, security protocol accelerators and processors, Root of Trust embedded security IP modules, secure boot and cryptography middleware, and content protection IP for integration into SoCs. [In other words], security IP cores and software solutions for mobile, automotive, digital home, IoT and cloud computing applications.”

Per the Press Release: “Elliptic’s integrated solutions enable the most efficient silicon design and highest level of security to help prevent a wide range of evolving threats in connected devices such as theft, tampering, side channels attacks, malware and data breaches. As a founding member of the prpl Foundation’s Security Working Group, Elliptic has been dedicated to defining an open security framework for deploying secured and authenticated virtualized services in the IoT and related emerging markets.”